Customer expectations continue to rapidly evolve and rise in today’s digital-first landscape. To meet these expectations, organizations must embrace personalization at scale, optimizing four key areas of their marketing technology stack to deliver the experiences customers demand.

Customers demand personalized content

Deloitte research shows that personalization is more crucial than ever:

The rising demand for personalized content is driven by increasingly sophisticated and complex customer journeys. Modern retail customers no longer engage with a brand by visiting its physical stores; they browse its website, buy through its mobile app, and interact with it on social media. And they expect brands to communicate in a timely, seamless manner across all of these channels, with relevant information and offers that reflect their demographic profile and historical behaviour such as past purchases, recently viewed items, and liked social media posts. In return, 75% of customers say they’re more likely to buy from brands that can deliver this personalized experience^.3

For brands, this demand for personalization is ultimately about being able to develop and deliver a wider variety of content that’s targeted to finely calibrated customer segments and tailored to specific channels—at scale and at speed. Today, just 45% of brands say they’re successfully delivering the personalized, relevant content their customers demand.⁴ It’s no wonder, since brands face a host of internal challenges in striving to create and deliver bespoke content at scale.

Delivering personalization at scale is challenging

Data-related challenges and organizational inefficiencies hamper brands’ content personalization efforts. On the data front, the deprecation of third-party cookies means that brands can no longer easily track customers’ actions and behaviours across other websites, which makes it harder to target customers with advertising on those third-party sites. Now, customers need to interact with a brand’s own site (or sites) for brands to collect crucial data. But even that has become more complicated: before brands can collect customer data on their site(s), Quebec Law 25 (formerly Bill 64) requires those customers to give their consent first, by accepting site cookies. Finally, capturing the data is one thing—brands also need a way to consolidate and store the customer data they collect from various channels in a centralized, secure manner that’s compliant with applicable regulations.

Organizational inefficiencies aren’t helping brands either. Delivering personalization at scale requires brands to create, manage, and approve a large volume of creative assets—which are often spread across different siloed systems, from email to chats to cloud storage. The risk of bottlenecks and manual errors is high: assets get duplicated, approvals get lost, and teams spend significant time tracking down the specific, approved assets they’re looking for. A lack of tracking and traceability makes it difficult to know which assets are used where and determine how long it takes to produce a campaign.

The solution: modernize your marketing tech stack

Brands know they need to transform their marketing and deliver smoother, timelier, more relevant messages and offers to their customers. They need to optimize their content supply chain by updating their marketing technology stack—leveraging best-practice data management, integrating decisioning capabilities, and harnessing AI tools. This doesn’t require brands to take a giant leap into the unknown, however. Achieving a bold personalization vision can be achieved by taking smart, incremental steps in four areas.

The benefits of personalization are real

Customers want more personalization—but does delivering it translate into real business results? Absolutely, according to our research. When brands deliver standout personalized value, they report improved metrics across the entire customers journey:

Use cases demonstrate real-world results

Deloitte has worked with brands in many industries, leveraging our relationships with Adobe and others to bring new tools and technologies to bear on organization’s ambitions of achieving personalization at scale:

• We helped a major airline achieve a higher look-to-book ratio by building new touchpoints throughout the booking funnel to reduce the number of abandoned flight searches and lost bookings.
• We worked with a major global insurer to achieve a 3% increase in sales revenue in the first year alone, with £4.8 million in operational efficiencies to be saves over four years.
• We helped a major UK retailer achieve a 17% increase in basket revenue through the use of a cross-sell algorithm, driving a £430,000 incremental revenue increase.
• We helped a leading consumer goods company achieve a potential annual net profit increase of €1.5–€1.8 million from personalized media targeting in Germany.

The Deloitte Digital difference

At Deloitte Digital, we help clients see what’s possible, identify what’s valuable, and deliver on it. Together with Adobe, we’re helping global organizations navigate today’s toughest challenges and transform how they grow customer trust and loyalty.

With two decades of joint global successes, Deloitte Digital collaborates with Adobe to deliver dynamic, tailored solutions and industry-specific accelerators that align and strengthen organizations’ capabilities, transform and demystify data, and elevate customer experiences to deliver rapid value for the business. As Adobe’s 2024 Digital Experience Partner of the Year – Americas, Deloitte Digital brings clients the combined experience and capabilities of more than 10,000 Adobe practitioners globally across 62 Deloitte Digital studios and 25 delivery centers. Our integrated capabilities are supported by a commitment to investing in and creating industry-leading IP and technology platforms, enabled by the power of Adobe Experience Cloud, to create custom solutions that are tailored to our clients’ industry and ambitions.

Personalization isn’t optional. We can help.

To meet customers’ needs and stay competitive in a fast-moving world, brands need to deliver personalization at scale. Deloitte Digital can help. Contact us today to book a maturity assessment of your organization’s personalization capabilities.